A federal judge has ordered the Biden administration to extend its sale of Gulf of Mexico oil leases later this month.
The Louisiana judge concluded that the Department of the Interior likely moved wrongly at the “eleventh hour” to remove roughly 6 million acres from the auction block.
At issue is the department’s decision last month to reduce the territory at stake in the Sept. 27 sale and impose traffic limits on ships in an attempt to safeguard the habitat of one of the world’s most threatened whales.
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management “failed to justify its pivot,” U.S. District Judge James Cain wrote in a 30-page ruling late Thursday. “The process followed here is more like a weaponization of the Endangered Species Act than the collaborative and reasoned approach prescribed by the applicable laws and regulations,” he said.
Cain ordered the department to complete the sale, including the acreage previously removed, by Sept. 30, a deadline imposed by last year’s climate law.
Louisiana Victory
The decision is a victory for Louisiana, which argued it could lose up to $2.2 million in royalties. Oil industry challengers to the administration’s plan included the American Petroleum Institute, Chevron USA Inc. and Shell Offshore Inc. Chevron had stressed that vessel delays would increase the time and money needed to complete projects in the area.
Ryan Meyers, senior vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, praised the ruling, saying it “stopped the ill-conceived effort by the Biden administration to restrict American development of reliable, low-carbon energy in gulf of mexico”.
But environmentalists said the order would further endanger the rice whale, a species whose numbers have dwindled to just 51.
“These baseline protections for the rice whale are literally the least we could be doing to save the species from extinction,” Earthjustice attorney Steve Mashuda said by email. “Meanwhile, the government is still allowing the oil industry to bid for 67 million acres in the Gulf. These oil companies look at the full glass after one gulp and call it empty.”
Earthjustice said it is considering appeal options. A spokeswoman for the Home Office declined to comment.
